I looked at the recaps of the scores. BD just totally blew everyone else away! I was really shocked to see Phantom at 11th place in visual and 9th overall. This is after a championship year! Has any other corps dropped this far this fast in DCI history? I loved Phantom's show last year and thought that they probably deserved to win.

Also, congrats to Troopers again. They really deserved their spot in finals and I am eager to see what they can do next year. If they can continue their meteoric rise maybe they can finish in the top 9 or so.

mckdan wrote:I looked at the recaps of the scores. BD just totally blew everyone else away! I was really shocked to see Phantom at 11th place in visual and 9th overall. This is after a championship year! Has any other corps dropped this far this fast in DCI history? I loved Phantom's show last year and thought that they probably deserved to win.

Also, congrats to Troopers again. They really deserved their spot in finals and I am eager to see what they can do next year. If they can continue their meteoric rise maybe they can finish in the top 9 or so.

If you mean has any other corps dropped this far the year after winning the championship, I believe the answer is no. But if you're talking just straight drops in placement in general, lots of corps have dropped further from one year to the next. The Kilties from 75-76 (7th - 28th) and 78-79(12th - 32nd) are good examples.

mckdan wrote:...I was really shocked to see Phantom at 11th place in visual and 9th overall. This is after a championship year! Has any other corps dropped this far this fast in DCI history? I loved Phantom's show last year and thought that they probably deserved to win...

72 Champion Kingsmen dropped to 6th in 73.

88 Scouts dropped to 7th in 89

89 SCV dropped to 6th in 90

90 Cadets dropped to 6th in 91

05 Cadets dropped to 5th in 06

What, it should be Spartacuses??

Music is like candy; to get to the good stuff, you have to remove the rappers...

I remember when Kilties dropped so much the second time. They had gone from all-male to coed and had made finals with a coed group. Then, they dropped like a stone the next year. I guess it must have finally broken the loyal members.

mckdan wrote:I remember when Kilties dropped so much the second time. They had gone from all-male to coed and had made finals with a coed group. Then, they dropped like a stone the next year. I guess it must have finally broken the loyal members.

As corps director for the Kilties through mid-July of that season, I can assure you it was more complicated than that.

The seeds for the 1979 season were planted in 1978. Those poor kids got whipsawed through a ton of changes. First, there was the move to a coed corps. Then, the new uniforms. In the beginning of the season, the corps had a hybrid battery, with each member playing a snare and several tuned tenors mounted on a harness. That was canned during their first tour in favor of a traditional battery, and the entire book had to be rewritten. Then, the closer of Billy the Kid was dropped and replaced with Scotland/Syne. As you might expect with all of this, there were a ton of drill changes. And, to top it off, their Executive Director abruptly left the corps right before their Nationals tour started.

The effect of this on the 1979 corps was that there wasn't much of a horn or drumline left to go with a pretty solid color guard (the '79 Kilts are one of the few guards I know that made WGI finals while NOT making the finals of their local circuit). Had I to do it all over again, I would have gone the Boston route - design a drill for a small horn line and go from there. Instead, we had Mel Stratton write a drill for a full horn line and tried to fill the holes as the season progressed. It was a mess, and I always felt bad for those kids.